Women's Writing in Italy, 1400–1650

Chapter Five. Affirmation: (1580‒1620)

chapter five     AFFIRMATION (150‒1620)  1. Women’s Writing in the Age of the Counter-Reformation The phase in the history of early modern Italian women’s writing that we are moving on to consider in the present chapter is in many ways the most remarkable of all those examined in this study. In the twenty-three years between 1538 and 1560, twenty new works authored by women were published in Italy, thirteen of which were collections of lyric and occasional poetry.1 The equivalent period between 1580 and 1602 saw the publication of thirty-seven such works, including pastoral dramas, religious narratives, a chivalric romance, and two volumes of letters as well as the first two substantial female-authored works of feminist polemic, one in the form of a dialogue, the other a treatise.2 The following ten years saw a further broadening of women’s generic range, to encompass tragedy and epic. We find women in this period being admitted to literary academies with a greater frequency than in the midcentury and in a few instances beginning to become involved in editorial activity; Marina Zancan talks in this period of women’s “progressive integration within the dynamics of the literary system .”3 Women’s presence on the literary scene as writers was complemented by their newer but striking prominence in other fields of creative activity, as painters, musicians, singers, and actresses: this was the age of Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614), of Isabella Andreini, of Maddalena Casulana (c. 1540–c. 1590), of the Ferrarese concerto delle donne.4 The deference paid to women’s artistic talent within Italian culture was arguably never so high as in this period; certainly, it would be difficult to claim that it had in any 131 way fallen off from a putative “Dionisottian” high point in the midcentury. While it is true that the later period produced no female writer of the “canonical” status of a Colonna or a Gambara, it could boast in the actresspoet Andreini a certified bestseller to rival Colonna, and figures like Moderata Fonte, Maddalena Campiglia, Margherita Sarrocchi (c. 1560–1618) and Lucrezia Marinella enjoyed widespread fame and respect in their day.5 If their names did not survive as well as those of predecessors such as Colonna or Stampa—most of these artists are critical “rediscoveries” of the past few decades—this is indicative as much as anything of the general lack of critical fortune of this period of Italian literature. With a few notable exceptions, the male-authored literature of the final decades of the sixteenth century remains itself equally critically unexplored. Another reason for the critical “invisibility” of late sixteenth-century women writers, until recently, is that this is not a period to which conventional literary historiography would have led one to look for a flourishing of female creativity. This, more than any, was the period when the dictates of the Counter-Reformation were making themselves felt within Italian literary culture. The practice of ecclesiastical censorship of books, first introduced at a national level in 1559, had progressively reshaped Italian publishing , in a manner already noted in chapter4. The proportion of religious texts published increased sharply in the final decades of the century, while the proportion of vernacular secular literature declined. The relatively tolerant moral climate of the early sixteenth century gave way to a new moral and religious fundamentalism. Censorship struck not only obviously “shocking” works like Machiavelli’s Principe and Aretino’s salacious dialogues between courtesans, which had been freely published in the 1530s, but even a work as seemingly unobjectionable as Castiglione’s Cortegiano , a mildly bowdlerized version of which was issued in 1584, shorn of anticlerical banter and passing references to the classical concept of “Fortune .”6 At the same time, more generally, in society, the church took an increasingly interventionist line in matters of public morality, seeking, for example, to regulate marriage and bring it within closer ecclesiastical control and to impose stricter discipline within convents.7 Within the secular and liberal perspective of traditional Italian literary historiography, these developments have tended to be seen in a negative light, and the period to be bleakly portrayed in general as one of authoritarianism and repression. Where women are concerned, the tendency has been, correspondingly, to regard this period as regressive with respect to the social and cultural “advances ” of the era immediately preceding it. A common tendency is to contrast the “Renaissance” protofeminism of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth...